Marie Bashkirtseva

Marie Bashkirtseva is remembered almost as much for what she wrote as for what she painted. Born near Poltava in the Russian Empire in 1860 into a wealthy family, she grew up mostly in France and, from her early teens, kept a diary in which she recorded her ambitions with startling frankness, determined to make her name before an early death she seemed to sense was coming.

She trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, one of the few studios that took women seriously, and painted scenes of ordinary Parisian life. Her best-known canvas, A Meeting, shows a cluster of poor street boys gathered around one of their number, absorbed in something in his hands, painted with the plain naturalism she admired in the realist painters of the day.

She died of tuberculosis in 1884, at just 25. Her mother published the diary a few years later, and it became a sensation across Europe, read by young women as the honest record of a gifted life cut short. Many of her paintings were later destroyed during the Second World War, and only a fraction of her work survives today.